Inside SAP’s acquisition of SmartRecruiters with CEO Rebecca Carr

At the beginning of August, enterprise tech giant SAP announced the intention to acquire leading talent acquisition company, SmartRecruiters.

Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH about the deal, SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr states: “Together, we’re not just responding to the future of work, we’re building it.

“We’ll continue to lead with product, driven by purpose, and grounded in the belief that great hiring changes everything.”

Now the acquisition has closed, UNLEASH sat down with Carr for an extended conversation.

Let’s explore the transformational journey of SmartRecruiters to date, and why this deal is positive for SAP, SmartRecruiters, and their thousands of customers worldwide.

SmartRecruiters’ journey from startup to SAP acquisition

Founded in 2010 by Jerome Ternynck, SmartRecruiters was built to be “a better applicant tracking system for the world”, Carr tells UNLEASH.

Ternynck had previously built an ATS, and sold it, and then thought “I can do better, so he started SmartRecruiters”.

Initially aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, around five years in, the company “decided we wanted to solve this problem for companies of global scale” – this became SmartRecruiters 2.0.

In partnership with clients, notably flagship customer multinational engineering company Robert Bosch, SmartRecruiters shifted to another world of recruiting and spent the next decade building enterprise hiring products.

Then in 2024, SmartRecruiters started looking at the market, and their product.

“We have created this monster of a platform with lots of different features and capabilities – it meets the needs of [enterprise] organizations, but is it really providing a best-in-class experiences to candidates and hiring managers?”

We might be better than most, but we could do better – we hold the bar high”, so Carr and her team “decided in the age of AI and automation, what an amazing moment to try and do this extremely well and lead the market in that moment”.

“We threw out the roadmap”, and launched Winston, SmartRecruiters’ flagship AI agent, named after the company’s long-standing mascot. Winston “does many jobs across the applicant tracking system, and has brought incredible insight and efficiency to so many of our customers globally”.

For Carr, Winston represents SmartRecruiters 3.0, where recruiting is powered by AI.

Rebecca Carr, CEO, SmartRecruiters.

Throughout its transformation journey, SmartRecruiters has been integrating a lot into SAP products, including SuccessFactors, the tech giant’s HCM suite.

Carr recalls that she was approached by Dan Beck, General Manager and Chief Product Officer for SAP SuccessFactors, and he shared that “we could be moving faster on recruiting”, so there might be an interesting partnership to pursue.

The benefit for SmartRecruiters is that “we’re flying blind” outside of recruiting.

“One of the things that is very limiting about best-of-breed products is that you lose visibility at the top and bottom of the funnel.”

It is hard to derive data from external sources or other HR products, like talent management, talent mobility or data and analytics.

While SmartRecruiters can drive efficiency in recruiting, gaining visibility across the rest of the HR ecosystem was key to unlocking the next level of innovation.

SAP was offering that visibility across its HCM suite and HR products; now SmartRecruiters is no longer flying blind and is able to see the full potential of enterprise hiring; is this acquisition driving SmartRecruiters 4.0?

The potential for SmartRecruiters 4.0 inside SAP

SmartRecruiters is just two weeks into being an SAP company.

However, the pair are already moving quickly.

Within the next couple of quarters, all SAP SuccessFactors, SAP E-Recruiting and SAP S/4HANA On-Premise customers can take advantage of the SmartRecruiters’ platform.

“As the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in recruiting, they have just unlocked this amazing technology with relatively low and efficient migration and implementation expense.”

The value, benefit and impact of SmartRecruiters is “now at their fingertips”, Carr states.

SmartRecruiters is going to remain very independent, and continue to work with companies using non-SAP third party technology.

When Carr called SmartRecruiters’ customers to tell them about the acquisition, they said that as long as the team was coming with, they were very happy. SAP “did not want to let go of one person in our company – no-one has been and will be eliminated”.

As a very people-centric leader myself, I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome not just for our people, but for our customers,” Carr tells UNLEASH.

Carr has a bold vision for the future of recruiting, powered by AI.

She believes that hiring will be “reduced to four critical decision moments”, and these will need to take place in the flow of work – in Teams, in Slack, in WhatsApp, in SMS – and “those experience that are delivered will be much more personalized” and customized.

Carr also wants to see Winston to have lots of agent friends in other best-of-breed platforms across the HR ecosystem, including SAP’s AI tool Joule. This will create a “next gen ecosystem”, which is under an umbrella of transparency and responsible AI – that’s a priority for SmartRecruiters and SAP alike.

Both SAP SuccessFactors and SmartRecruiters are sponsoring UNLEASH World 2025 – you can find out more about their partnership live on stage at the upcoming Paris show. It’s not too late to grab a pass.